It’s November 30, 11:30 pm, the end of Digital Writing month. By my own criteria, I didn’t make it to 50,000 words. I’m at 46k. Between my SBL presentation, website, grantwriting, Twitter, Facebook, and other digital writing, I’m just shy. I’m sure if I added in all my email in November, I’d hit 50k, which does make me ask a couple of questions: why did I bracket email to begin with? and did DigiWriMo make me write more, or make me more conscious of what I wrote?
For question #2, I think the question is clearly the latter — I did not try to write extra for DigiWriMo, and yet I hit almost 50k words over the course of my regular writing. Wow.
As for email — it’s digital, it’s writing, but it seems so…old-fashioned. Too old fashioned to count as digital writing. Or so I thought. And maybe still do. I think of digital writing, my digital writing, as about innovation, a change in what my scholarship is. Yet, when I think about it, I’ve been doing it for ages. I’ve had my domain www.carrieschroeder.com since grad school, well over 10 years.
My twitter essay was about digital writing as simultaneously something I’ve always done and something that is the infinite horizon of what I want to be doing. It is the present and the potential.
I’m glad I tracked my digital writing this month, because I had no idea what my present and potential was, quantifiably. I had no idea that in digital writing, I would write the equivalent of 40 essays that I assign my students in the course of one month.
